How To Take Your Email Marketing To The Next Level

With Jess Chan & Melanie Balke

Baby Bathwater Institute
Baby Bathwater Institute
How To Take Your Email Marketing To The Next Level
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March 2021

Email marketing is (still) a thriving marketing channel for most businesses in our world, but it can be a beast to tackle if you want to do it well.

With growing ad costs and uncertainty around the new iOS update, it’s as good a time as ever to focus inward to see what kind of opportunities you might be leaving on the table.

So Hollis & Lovitch recently sat down with a few of our members that are most familiar with this channel so they could take us to school…

Jess and Melanie are two Baby Bathwater members that know their sh*t when it comes to email marketing (after all, they each own their own agency dedicated to the topic).

We picked their brains on best practices, funnel ideas, campaign ideas, creative segmentation, and more.

Catch the recording for:

  • Why Klaviyo is primed to become the most relevant email marketing software (as long as they get their data analysis/reporting shit together)
  • The 7 core email flows that will give you the most bang for your buck
  • The worst and best ways to hit your customers on SMS
  • Clever email capture testing (and the psychology behind them)
  • And a bonus tasteful disagreement on affiliate marketing in e-commerce

Resources:

PLUS...A BONUS LESSON ON EMAIL SUPPRESSIONS:

Dave Sinick, CEO of PaleoHacks, is another BBW Member that knows a thing or two about email. A while back he shared this helpful tip to our online group about email suppressions that’s worth spreading:

“[EMAIL SUPPRESSIONS]

So here’s a million+ dollar mistake…over the past few years with Maropost we’ve been doing our suppressions with negative logic.

I.e. “Send to everyone, EXCEPT people who haven’t opened in X days or clicked in X days”

Over the last year or so, our email stats have been declining, which I just attributed to primary tab issues, gmail issues, etc. But later in the year we REALLY stepped up our game in terms of leads/customer acquisition, and yet our revenue and engagement didn’t bounce back. It was SUPER frustrating and I was starting to panic that we were gonna be fucked on e-mail — we lost our biggest sponsor for the most part and January this year was our worst email month in 2 years, even though January in health/fitness is usually absurd.

So it’s amazing what sobriety and a change of environment can do, I finally got off my dumbass and dove in… and it turns out that this suppression setup was blocking our e-mails from going out to, oh, i dunno….60,000+ of our most engaged people?

I think what was happening is that it was suppressing people before they ever got the chance to engage with us (or something along those lines) and so even though some months we’d add 100k people to our list, they’d never see our emails. This coincides with a few people (over a year ago, woof) telling me they didn’t get my emails anymore for some reason.

So, I went into maropost and we changed our suppressions to be POSITIVE based. So instead of:

“Send to everyone, EXCEPT people who haven’t opened in X days or clicked in X days”

It’s now:

“Send to everyone who has opened in X days or clicked in X days”

We are currently rotating between:
30day openers + 6 month clickers
30day openers + 9month clickers
30day openers + 12 month clickers
45day openers + 9 month clickers
15 day openers + 8 month clickers
60day openers + 4 month clickers

I honestly don’t have a good explanation for why it’s like that…

And so wouldn’t you know it….in the last 4 days or so since we changed to these suppressions, we’ve set records on opens and clicks…hitting 100k+ in opens for the first time in over 2 years. And this is likely going to translate to an extra $100k+/mo for the rest of the year, if not significantly more.

Honestly, there’s a huge part of me that is pissed that I fucked this up for so long, but more importantly, I’m just glad there was something broken that we could fix and it wasn’t just the end of our email marketing (since that’s 30-40%+ of our bottom line).

So anyway, if ya’ll have sizable email lists and aren’t sure about your suppressions setup, DEFINITELY double check that shit. Don’t make the same mistake that we did!

And if you have any email questions at all that’s my shit (though all shopify & autoresponder questions should be pointed at Jess Chan who taught me the real sekretz there.)”

This group isn’t for everyone,
but it might be for you...